How to Get Good Advice

Don’t ask a writer or editor you do not respect to give you constructive criticism.

Find a writer or editor you respect and ask just onetime for his/her undivided attention. (unless you are compensating them). You cannot go back to the well again and again and again…unless you stupidly keep paying them for advice you never take…

Spend less time with writers and editors you do not respect.

Spend more time with writers and editors you do respect.

When a writer or editor you respect takes the time to consider your work and offers advice…Thank them and act on it. Even if you think the advice is stupid… Chances are, if you respect them, the advice they’re offering is just the thing you need to take your work to the next level.

Whatever you do, don’t respond like this:

Thanks for these notes, but I’m going for something bigger than just “genre” fiction.

I’m too close to the work now to consider the kinds of changes you’re suggesting. I mean, I’d probably have to re-write the whole thing!

I read an interview with Jean Cocteau in the Paris Review that contradicts your insistence that readers want a beginning, middle and end. As I recall, he said something like this “There is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.” I guess I’m like Cocteau. I just can’t compromise my vision to serve the necessities of the marketplace.

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Begin today

Start with this War of Art [27-minute] mini-course. It's free. The course's five audio lessons will ground you in the principles and characteristics of the artist's inner battle. Continue each week (also free) with our Writing Wednesdays and What It Takes posts, each one like a new chapter in The War of Art. Plus continual videos, freebies, specials and new material throughout the year.

THE WAR OF ART

Read this one first.It identifies the enemy—what I call Resistance with a capital “R,” i.e. fear, self-doubt, procrastination, perfectionism, all the forms of self-sabotage—that stop us from doing our work and realizing our dreams.Start here.Everything else proceeds from this.

DO THE WORK

Steve shows you the predictable Resistance points that every writer hits in a work-in-progress and then shows you how to deal with each one of these sticking points. This book shows you how to keep going with your work.

NOBODY WANTS TO READ YOUR SH*T

Steve shares his "lessons learned" from the trenches of the five different writing careers—advertising, screenwriting, fiction, nonfiction, and self-help. This is tradecraft. An MFA in Writing in 197 pages.

I’ve found that respect, like trust, requires tolerance, builds slowly with time, and often travels a bumpy road. Disrespect, on the other hand, is usually instantaneous and respect is never recoverable.